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Apple iPhone charger teardown: quality in a tiny expensive package (2012)
This article is now available in Vietnamese Bộ sạc iPhone của Apple . Disassembling Apple's diminutive inch-cube iPhone charger reveals ...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 6,985 posts.
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Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories
a blog post by @azwinkau
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A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Representation Engineering: Mistral-7B on Acid
Playing around with the Representation Engineering paper, I made some interesting control vectors, and a Python package to make your own.
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React as a UI Runtime
An in-depth description of the React programming model.
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Why haven't quantum computers factored 21 yet?
Craig Gidney's computer science blog
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Trump
I'm going to say something very unpopular in my world: Trump is right about some big things. He's right that many Americans are getting screwed by the system. He’s right that the economy is not...
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Alpine makes Python Docker builds slower, and images larger
Alpine Linux is often recommended as a smaller, faster Docker base image. But if you’re using Python, it will slow down your build and make your image larger.
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The Guy I Almost Was (1998)
An online graphic novel about a young man's coming of age in the California cyberculture of the early 1990s.
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Visualizing quaternions: An explorable video series
Explaining how quaternions, a four-dimensional number system, describe 3d rotation.
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How well do cars do in crash tests they're not optimized for?
Any time you have a benchmark that gets taken seriously, some people will start gaming the benchmark. Some famous examples in computing are the CPU benchmark specfp and video game benchmarks. With specfp, Sun managed to increase its score on 179.art (a sub-benchmark of specfp) by 12x with a compiler tweak that…
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Yagni
Yagni ("You Aren't Gonna Need It") is the principle that we should not build presumptive features. It should not be used as a justification for neglecting internal quality.
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Intuitive Understanding of Euler’s Formula
Euler's identity seems baffling: It emerges from a more general formula: Yowza -- we're relating an imaginary exponent to sine and cosine! And somehow…
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Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
We’ve lost far too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
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Counterfeit Macbook charger teardown: convincing outside but dangerous inside
What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown , a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. ...
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A letter to Steven Pinker about global poverty
*Note: the discussion of historical poverty trends here is updated and developed more fully in the recent article, “ Capitalism and extreme poverty ”, published in World Development . Dear Steven, I’m writing to respond to a letter you posted regarding claims I made in the Guardian about
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The StarCraft path-finding hack
StarCraft pathfinding looked impossible to fix until one ugly hack changed everything. Here's the trick that shipped.
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Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
It's really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim. Here are the last few instances of this that I've run across.
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Shortwave Trading: The West Chicago Tower Mystery
Since 2014 this blog has extensively covered the wireless networks built by high-frequency trading (HFT) firms or network providers to reduce latencies between the different exchanges around the wo…
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Using unix as your IDE
This series has been independently translated into Chinese , Russian , Turkish , and Korean , and formatted as an ebook .
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Why Python Is Slow: Looking Under the Hood
When I teach courses on Python for scientific computing, I make this point very early in the course, and tell the students why: it boils down to Python being a dynamically typed, interpreted language, where values are stored not in dense buffers but in scattered objects. And then I talk about how to get around this by…
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Unix recovery legend
It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…